There has been an increasing trend in the use of mesh networks in home automation systems, building/industrial automation systems, infrastructure monitoring, secured military applications and other peer-to-peer connectivity systems.
A mesh network is typically understood to be an interconnected set of nodes, wherein each node contributes to the provision of information and/or signals across all other nodes. In other words, there may be more than one communication path between an arbitrary pair of nodes in the mesh network. This allows a mesh network to have a degree of redundancy, such that, for example, if a single node becomes inactive, the remaining nodes may still communicate with one another.
Typically, each node in a mesh network operates on the same communication channel, so as to permit ease of communication between all nodes of the mesh network. A node may comprise, for example, a wireless-connectable device capable of operating on a given wireless communication channel. Examples of such nodes may comprise a ZigBee® router or a BlueTooth-enabled relay.
US2012/224571 A1 (Yuan Wei [NL] et al) 6 Sep. 2012 describes a proxy device which is adapted to route packets from a resource restricted device to a mesh network. In an embodiment, the packets are translated into a different packet format by the proxy device.
US2014/105066 A1 (Erdmann Bozena [DE] et al) 17 Apr. 2014 appears to describe a process in which a network configuration parameter of a limited node (of a network) is updated to match an update to the network configuration parameter of a plurality of nodes in the network.